Marek and Florian from BAM were at ReactNext 2017, and Florian was giving a talk about React Native and native Android/iOS modules. Here are notes from the different talks we saw!

Things you didn't know you can do with React Native 

Vladimir Novick talked about 3 topics about React Native, including how to make advanced animations with React Native :

• lottie-react-native, a wrapper around Lottie by AirBnb to display animations exported from After Effects - fully native!
• gl-react-native-v2

He continued by talking about physical beacons, small devices that your phone can recognized, what the use cases are (museums, shops...) and how to use them with React Native.

He also demonstrated an example of a light bulb controlled by a React Native apps. Sweet!

Two of tools he mentioned to use for physical web and IoT are :

• react-native-beacons-manager
• react-native-ble-plx

Get That CSS Out Of My JavaScript

Great talk by Brian Hough explaining how CSS in JS is working, what are the current shortcomings of CSS and how CSS-in-JS libraries can help overcome theses shortcomings.

Slides are available online: https://speakerdeck.com/bhough/get-that-css-out-of-your-js

WebVR and React 

Introduction talk to react-vr, with a live demo that was available: bit.ly/solar-vr! Shay Keinan talked about core components, similar to the ones of React Native. Animations and styling are also very similar to React Native so that any React Native developer can be quickly familiar with React-VR :)

Webpack - The React Parts 

Juho Veps?l?inen is the founder of SurviveJS, editor of a great set of books about React and Webpack. He showed us how to optimise a production build by passing from a single JS file of 1.5MB to few kB. If you haven't read his books yet - go and get them. They are really worth it.

Universal React Apps Using Next.js 

Sia Karamalegos introduced Next.js, a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React apps. Lots of features are builtin and she explained how to use it to create a new project, create new pages, what is prefetching...

Practical Advanced Redux 

Boris Dinkevich shared advanced Redux concepts. In fact, as he said, the most advanced Redux concept is middleware. He started by explaining how middlewares are working and made a live demonstration of different middlewares ? The live demo was really smooth and went without a single problem, well done!

Dealing with Data Offline in Web Apps 

Jai Santhosh explained the new for apps that take care of properly working even when internet signal is low or unavailable , in particular in countries like India (355 millions users, ~10% of Internet users).

He explained how we can use redux-offline (based on redux-persist) to persist the store to disk, with a offline subtree and an array of outbox, or PouchDB.

Write Once, Render Anywhere

Peggy Rayzis explained how we can aim to have universal components that works across all platforms (iOS, Android, but also browsers and even Sketch and VR with react-sketchapp and react-vr).

Peggy gave an interesting stat:

92% of developers who used React Native would use it again.

Not bad!

GatsbyJS - How to Create The Fastest Sites In The World 

Kyle Mathews gave an overview of everything that matters when it comes to measuring and improving website loading performance, with comparisons between websites created with Gatsby and well known newspapers website.

He made a blog post following his talk: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2017-09-13-why-is-gatsby-so-fast/

D3 and React, Together

React and D3 may not be easy to use together, because they both need to manage the DOM. Shirely Wu showed us how to mix them to leverage the power of both frameworks. Her talk was beautifully illustrated with many of her dataviz projects available on her website.

Bridges to React Native

Florian Rival from BAM explained how the bridge between JS and native works, how native modules can be created and which tool to use to quickly bootstrap them. He then gave an overview of all the native tooling that developers can use to ease and speed-up their work on native modules.

His slides are available here : https://slides.com/florianrival/bridges-to-react-native

Detox - Graybox E2E Tests and Automation Library for React Native 

This talk was one of the most exciting from ReactNative perspective. The community really needs a better E2E framework and Graybox is addressing all the pain-points of current solutions. Rotem Mizrachi-Meidan, a member of Wix team who created this framework, showed us the philosophy behind and ran a small demo to show its features. It's definitely something will be trying out really soon !

ReactNext 2017 Videos

All the videos of the talks of ReactNext are now available on YouTube. See them here (videos from Hall A) and here (videos from Hall B)!

We really enjoyed the conference. It was really well organised, well paced and the speakers were great :) Big thanks to 500Tech and we look forward to the next year edition! ?